Here are its salient features:

1. We promote accumulation of vast fortunes without limits.
2. We shun progressive income taxes that could narrow the gap.
3. We keep most of finance deregulated even after it has collapsed so spectacularly.
4. We let the minimum wage atrophy.
5. We discourage unionization.
6. We let middle class jobs disappear.
7. We allow a revolving door between public office and high paying private sector jobs.
8. We let our public infrastructure deteriorate.
9. We belittle government and public service.
10. We promote private gain as the best way to promote the common good.
11. We force our children to pile up debt in order to get an education.
12. We live with a porous safety net.
13. We encourage health care to be a profit maximizing enterprise.
14. We allow institutions to become too big to fail.
15. We bail out the largest financial institutions when they do fail, even if that means transferring trillions to Wall Street.
16. We allow Wall Street to use its bailout money to lobby against the public interest.
17. We let Wall Street keep its bailout-created “profits” and bonuses.
18. We have no clue if the financial sector provides any real value to our economy.
19. We permit financial hucksters to buy up solid companies, load them up with debt, take the cash, and then drive them into the ground.
20. We bad-mouth as protectionist all efforts to keep jobs in this country.
21. We don’t have any serious plan for returning to a full-employment economy.
22. We live in awe of billionaires.

Credit to Huffington Post and Les Leopold

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

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